60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

Today, January 27th, 2005 is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz (I highly recommend at least scanning this Wikipedia article today.) I am posting this memorial to all those who died, not only at Auschwitz but at all the death camps, as part of a Blogburst.

The gate into Auschwitz – ‘Work Makes Free’Auschwitz, in southern Poland, just to the west of Krakow is considered to have been the primary camp for the extermination of the Jewish peoples. While not the only such camp, it, with its industrial extensions at Birkenau, was the largest and is now the most well known of them. It was the primary user of the Zyklon B gas chambers in Nazi Germany’s efforts to exterminate all undesirables – not just Jews, but also Poles, gypsies, Russian POWs, the old, the mentally ill, the handicapped, and other prisoners from the territories that the Nazi armies invaded.

The term “holocaust” has been in the English language (among others) for a long time prior to World War 2. It was only after the war, when the monstrosity of the actions of the Nazi government were discovered that the efforts to exterminate all the targeted groups that the term was applied to the organized slaughter of millions. At the same time, the term “genocide” was developed because there was no simple way to describe the methodical wholesale extermination of an entire race, culture, and ethnicity. Since the Second World War, there have been many other holocausts, many other genocides. None, however, have caught the wholesale attention that this one did. There are many reasons that this is so, now is not the time to enter into that discussion, important though it is.

Even though the Red Army “liberated” the camp, the term is unfortunately, essentially, a misnomer. The majority of the people kept at the camp had been force-marched away, ahead of the oncoming Russians. 7,600 people were left when the soldiers entered the camp. Many did not survive. It is almost ironic that the Soviet forces closed the camp down, when half a year earlier, they had sat across the Vistula river from Warsaw, while, for two months, the Polish resistance group the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK) fought a desperate and unaided battle against the Nazi occupying forces. With help, Warsaw would have been the first European capital liberated, instead, it’s valient citizens were slaughtered because they were denied assistance from Stalin. The situation of those resistance fighters was similar to that of the peoples in the death camps – the allied leaders knew what was happening in both places, but for various political reasons did nothing.

What can be learned from this? Only that there is no greater tragedy than loss of life as a result of the inaction of those who can offer salvation. This day of memorial should also be one of looking forward. One of the great lines from the mostly unheard of movie The Boondock Saints states that “[w]e must always fear the wicked. But there is another kind of evil that we must fear the most, and that is the indifference of good men.” Today, we should look forward to a day when no group of people can stand by while their brethren are abused and violated by others. How can any person, any nation, claim to value human life and at the same time allow that very basic of human rights be taken from entire groups of people? In doing so once, the civilized world fell into a global war, costing the lives of millions upon millions of people above and beyond the lives taken in the concentration camps. In doing so since then, we have only brought shame upon our nations, and degraded our own right for help in the future. In a world where a nation has trumpeted the right of the individual to chose, and has thrown down a dictator who has been accused of genocide, the well-known words of Martin Niemöller, a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the rise of Nazi power still ring true, and even more powerful than ever before:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak out for me.